


The Price of Love

by updatebug



Category: Leverage, Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Adoption, Cluster - Freeform, Empathy, Evil BPO, Fake Character Death, Family, Found Family, Kidnapping, Leverage AU, Leverage Adoption, Mentions of Suicide, OC heavy, Sam Ford's Cluster, Sam Lives, Sam's Cluster are OCs, Sensate Sam Ford, Sense8 AU, Slight Violence, mental health, pychics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:15:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24652186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/updatebug/pseuds/updatebug
Summary: "The hospitals are how they get you. Waking up, it's a lot like being ill. headaches, nausea, hallucinations. And, once they've got you. They don't let you go."Nathan Ford does not believe in psychics. He does not believe in magical children. and cross-country telepathy and mental bonds. Most importantly, he does not believe that his son is alive.Fortunately for Nathan Ford, he is wrong.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 45





	1. Chapter 1

**Hey so, disclaimer, I thought that William was Sophie’s father and Lady Kensington Sophie’s actual aunt. Wikipedia has since informed me that William was a boyfriend, and Lady Kensington _his_ aunt. Unfortunately, this story has been written under my initial assumption so yeah, Sophie is British nobility in this one. **

When Sophie Devereaux was five years old, she very nearly caused an international incident at a party. At time, of course, she was not called Sophie. Sophie did not exist yet. At the time she was merely the only daughter of the Baron Thynne, pretty and perfect and, most importantly, seen and not heard when her father needed her to be.

The incident in question was during a rather important ball. He father has been schmoozing with some investment prospects and showing of his only child. It was caused, by Sophie insisting quite stridently that mama was not currently mama but was instead a man named Joseph Kelly. She had insisted so hard, in fact, that auntie had assumed that Mr Kelly had somehow been her mother’s lover and caused quite a fuss attempting to prove it.

Later, Mama had told her how absolutely secret that Uncle Joe and Aunties Mariam, Zariah and Scarlett were. Unfortunately, the damage was already done. The information was out there, and people went looking. Uncle Joe was caught by the BPO only three years later and, within nine months Sophie’s aunties were tracked down too. Her Mama was the hardest for them to get to. Which, in a way was just as much her downfall as the BPO was there’s. She held on until Sophie was seventeen. And then Sophie came home to find her in the bathtub. There was a note. Sophie was packed and gone before her father ever made it home. Name and titles discarded before she’d even left the house. She was Gemma Lynn, for a while, then Harley Meyers, then Martina Grace and Eloise Bisset. For a time, when she was seventeen and desperate she was even Martin James, greasy hair shove beneath a baseball cap and too thin figure hidden beneath an oversized hoody.

She had soft spot for being Sophie Devereaux though. It was Sophie Devereaux who had shot and been shot by a tricky insurance investigator in Paris, and Sophie Devereaux was the name she had kept when she went straight. Surely, _surely_ the BPO would not still be looking for the long-lost child of a sensate, who had never been confirmed as one. It was Sophie Devereaux who Nathan Ford recruited back into a life of crime, and Sophie Devereaux who found a new family in team Leverage, with Parker, Eliott, Hardison and even Nate. It was _not_ Sophie Devereaux who recognised the sensate in the bar.

Xxx

It didn’t matter how used he was to the feeling. Whiskey always burned going down.

At the other end of the bar, he could almost feel the judgement of Eliott, Hardison and Parker, even though they were playing pool, and giving off every attention of not paying attention to him. Well, Eliott and Hardison were playing pool. Parker seemed to be…he wasn’t entirely sure. Either goading them on or offering encouragement. With Parker it could be hard to tell.

Nate’s hand shook slightly as he poured himself another drink and he pretended not to notice it. The most recent job. That had been hard. The airport. That kid. The selfish prick willing to let a child die just so he wouldn’t. Nate downed his drink, already pouring himself another. He paused, the glass pressed against his lip. There was children in the bar. Two of them. They were watching him.

Carefully, he shifted, twisting his head so that he could them in the reflection behind the bar. They about thirteen. The same age that Sam would be. They were sitting in a booth, a single bowl of onion rings shared between them. The boy was short, compact, with dark green eyes and black curls, his skin a dark tan that could be natural, or the result of hours spent in the sun. He was throwing onion rings in the air and attempting to catch them in his mouth, though Nate noticed that hadn’t stopped him from sliding his arm over the booth divider and stealing a wallet from a jacket someone had hung over it. The girl was tall and thin, nibbling on the batter fretfully while shooting Nate long glances under her eyelashes. Her hair was a dirty blond with a pink streak that was starting to grow out and her shoulders were tense.

There was a messenger bag on the seat beside her. It was navy, with half a dozen badges pinned across its front. The zip on a side pocket was broken, only zipped halfway and inside he could see a stick of deodorant, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste, squeezed flat and then rolled all the way up to the top of the tube. The boy missed his mouth, the onion ring bouncing off his cheek where it left a streak of grease before landing on the floor. The boy looked down, and shrugged, scooping it up and popping it in his mouth, chewing loudly. Nate grimaced. The floors of the bar weren’t exactly _clean_. The girl had evidently had the same thought because she pulled a face, sticking her tongue out like she was the one who had eaten it. The bowl was nearly empty, and the girl looked at it for a long moment, making a show of checking her pockets before pulling a crumpled bill out of her jeans.

“I’ll get us some chips, or something,” she said loudly, glancing around the bar like expecting someone to notice and standing up, hooking the bag over her shoulder.

She had a British accent. Not quite upper class, but certainly Queen’s English. It was out of place on an obvious runaway in the middle of Boston. He wasn’t surprised when she headed straight toward him. The boy watched her go, green eyes pinned to her back. He’d folded his hands and was tap-tap-tapping his thumbs together in the same nervous gesture that Sam used to have. The girl stood next to him at the bar and Nate put his drink down, giving no other indication that he had noticed her. She was clutching the messenger bag to her stomach and, despite saying she was going to order, she was doing absolutely nothing to get Cora’s attention.

“Um,” She said, eventually, shooting him another glance.

Nate raised an eyebrow, turning to look at her for the first time, instead of her reflection. She was twitchy. Kept resisting the urge to look over her shoulder.

“Um,” She said again, looking to the side as though someone was there before smiling softly and turning back to him. “Are you Nate Ford?”

“You could say that,” Nate said. Sophie, who had been sat near Parker was staring at the girl like she was a mark, and Sophie was going to decode her deepest desires. He’d never seen her turn her gaze on a kid before.

“Um, I’m Sarah,” The girl said, before wincing like she hadn’t meant to give that name. “Sarah…Marks?” _Obviously fake_. She held out a hand for him to shake and he did so. Her hand was trembling slightly, and he made the conscious effort to make his expression gentler. She was just a kid, after all. It wasn’t her fault if everything today reminded him of Sam.

“I have a job for you,” she said taking her hand back and tucking it firmly around the messenger bag again. “A job that you’ll want to take, I mean. I – we have some money, if you need it. My friend can sent it to your account, if you, if you agree to hear us out.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Sarah,” Nate said, and the girl threw another worried look over her shoulder towards the door. There was no one there. He kept his voice gentle, soft. Over at the pool table Eliott had given up the pretence of the game and was just staring, waiting to see if Nate needed the assist. Nate shook his head slightly and continued. “We work in alternate revenue streams. Why don’t you tell me what’s got you so worried?”

Sarah swallowed, meeting his eyes for the first time. Her eyes were very blue. And very scared. “I – is there maybe somewhere more private that we could talk? It’s a little bit…tricky.”

“Sure thing,” Nate said, “We have a back room, if that’s what you want.”

He waved at the others, gesturing towards it, before leading Sarah round to the door. He was a little surprised that the boy didn’t try and follow. But he stayed where he was , green eyes burning into Nate’s back until he and Sarah had left the room.


	2. Chapter 2

“I do not like this,” Hideo said, perched in the corner of the back room that Nate Ford had led Sarah into. Hideo was scowling fiercely, his arms crossed. As always, Sarah felt a slight thrill that she understood his Japanese. She had never been good at languages in school. Having five downloaded straight into her brain felt like a bit of a cheat.

“To be fair, Hid,” Olu said, from the chair next to Sarah. “You don’t like anything much.”

Hideo pulled a face at her and Sarah fought down the urge to giggle nervously, tapping her thumbs together in a soothing motion.

“You should not be going in without backup,” Hideo continued, scowling over at Nate.

“What am I, then?” James squawked, indignantly, green eyes flashing. He had been pacing the backroom like a tiger, looping around the whiteboard, over to where Nate was and then back to Sarah’s side over and over again. She should have asked him to come in with her. But then no one would be watching the door.

“Someone who needs to calm down,” Olu said. “you both are. This is going to work.”

“Well forgive me, if I don’t enjoy hinging our entire plan on ‘some guys who really screwed over Celeste’s Father’s American business partner.”

James cackled, and even Olu snickered. It had been a very funny story. Celeste certainly hadn’t been able to tell it without laughing. There was an empty space in the room where Celeste would be if she weren’t on blockers. There was another empty space right next to it.

“That’s not all we have to go on,” Sarah said, softly. “This is _Nate Ford_.”

“Sorry, did you say something?” Nate asked and Sarah blushed darkly, waving subtly for the others to _stop talking!_

“Um, shouldn’t you fetch your friends?” Sarah said. “I, um I saw you wave at them when we came in here, didn’t you want them to be here too?”

“I thought,” Nate said, “That you might prefer not to be too crowded.”

“Yeah,” Sarah said softly, trying to ignore the byplay happening over her head. She was always crowded. “I think, maybe you should go and get them? This isn’t, you aren’t,” she hugged her bag closer. “You aren’t going to believe me, and then you are going to believe me, and it might be easier if everyone is here at once, so you don’t have to try and make them believe you and –” She could feel her voice going higher and higher pitched, even as she tried to force herself to stop rambling.

“Hey,” Nate said gently, the tone helping just as much as Olu’s hand on her arm. “It’s okay, I’ll believe you,” _He wouldn’t_. “I’ll go get the others now if that’ll make you feel better.”

He left the room, the door closing with a soft click behind him.

“Tell me when he comes back,” she said to James.

“Obviously,” He rolled his eyes.

Sarah sighed, putting her head in her hands and shifting in her seat. Celeste would be so much better at this. Nothing scared her. Of course, Celeste had her own problems to deal with.

“Okay,” She breathed out, “I can do this. I can definitely do this.”

“Good,” Said James. “Because they’re coming back.”

Xxx

The green-eyed boy was still sitting at the booth watching the door when Nate come out. He didn’t react when Nate came out alone. Not even a little bit. No stress, so suspicion, no worry. Strange, when he had been so concerned to watch his friend leave.

“Hey,” Nate said quietly, as he reached the group. “I need you in the back room.”

“Oooh, do we have a job?” Parker said, bouncing in place, and grin on her face.

“Ah man,” Hardison whined. “I still haven’t recovered from the last one. I landed a plane, people. Does no one appreciate how I landed a plane?”

“Yes, we’re all very impressed,” Nate said dryly, shooting another look at the boy. He had now relaxed almost completely and kept glancing at the empty seat next to him. “I need you in the back room.”

“With the kid?” Eliot asked. He was still holding onto a pool cue, though the game had long since been suspended, and his shoulders were tense. He kept looking at the kid too, and then at the windows and doors. “You know they’re being chased by something.”

“I know,” Nate said. The tension in their shoulders, the runaway bag, the look on the girl’s face when she ate the onions rings. Like she’d been eating junk food for months and the novelty had long since worn off. “Or they think they are. I need you all in the back room.”

“All of us?” Sophie asked. Her eyebrows were creased, and her voice just a fraction too earnest. Nate filed that away for later. Just in case. “I mean, won’t that overwhelm the poor girl, all us coming in? It’s not how we normally do things.”

“I know,” Nate agreed. “But she asked. Apparently, she would feel better explaining it to all of us at once. Come on.”

He led them into the back room, where Sarah, of the fake last name, was waiting. She was still in the same chair she had made a beeline for once he’d led her into the room, It let her keep her eyes on the door to the pub, and gave her enough room to make a lunge for the backdoor into the alley if she needed to. She didn’t seem too surprised to see them. Or at the very least, she seemed to already know who he would be coming back into the room with. 

“Sarah,” He said, nodding at her, she smiled tightly back. “This is my team, Sophie, Eliot, Parker and Hardison. Everyone, this is Sophie Marks, she says she had a job for us.”

“Nice,” Parker chirped, flopping down into a chair at the table and staring at Sarah intently. “What’s the job? Oooh are there diamonds involved? I could steal you a diamond. I’m good at that.”

“Um,” Sarah tapped her thumbs together, blushing intensely. “No, I um, don’t need a diamond, thank you.”

“How did you hear about us anyway,” Eliot said, sitting down next to Parker, Hardison taking the seat next to him. Sophie, he noticed did not take a seat at the table. She had circled round to the small bar and perched on the stool, distancing herself from the conversation. “Sorry, but,” Eliot shot the girl a quick smile, his voice slightly gentler the same way it always was when he was talking to a kid. “You’re a little younger than our normal Client. How old even are you, fourteen?”

“Thirteen,” Sarah corrected. “Fourteen in May.”

Nate kept his wince to himself, although he knew that Sophie and Eliot at least would have caught it. Fourteen in May. The same as Sam would have been.

“And, um,” She rubbed her forehead, a grin tugging at her lip, although it didn’t quite rub the worried tension from her eyes. “I, my friend’s dad had heard of you. Apparently, you messed things up for his business –” She winced, flinching slightly as though someone had shouted in her ear. Nate shot a glance at Hardison, who shrugged. He didn’t see an earpiece either, then. “Anyway,” Sarah continued, biting her lip. “I mean, that’s not how we heard of you. But when she said Nate Ford, we thought that maybe it was the same Nate Ford and it was, and we thought that you would help us.”

“Yeah,” Nate said, taking a seat at the table, careful to be far enough that he wouldn’t crowd her but close enough that it didn’t look like he was indifferent. “We can help you, that’s what we do. Tell us what happened to you.”

The girl took a deep breath and pulled a folder out of her bag. It was a cheap, plastic one, obnoxiously pink with a picture of some superhero on the cover. Sarah placed it on the table but didn’t open it yet. She shot a glance at Nate, underneath her eyelashes, nervous and somehow...guilty? He wasn’t sure.

“Have – have you ever heard of, of a Sensate?”

Over by the bar Sophie’s eyes widened. Nate shook his head. Eliot looked blank too, as did Parker and Hardison. They hadn’t heard of it, either, then.

“No, is it an organisation? A company?” Nate asked.

“No,” Sarah shrunk slightly, cringing down towards the table, and pressing her hands flat against the folder, trapping it between her and the table. “I, um it’s a species.”

“A species?” Eliot asked, raising an eyebrow, “What like a bird or a frog or something.”

“Like a human?” The girl squeaked, cringing impossibly further down. “Um, like a new species of human.”

“Wait what? Like superpowers, from Hardison’s movies?” Parker asked. “That’s real? I didn’t think that was real?”

“That’s not real,” Eliot said, rolling his eyes, “it’s just from Hardison’s stupid movies.”

“My movies are stupid? _My_ movies are stupid?” Hardison exclaimed, pressing his hand against his chest. “What was the last thing you watched? Some weird black and white German cra…aab.”

“I like the way they hold a mirror to society, alright?” Eliot said, glaring at Hardison.

Nate cleared his throat, waiting until he had their attention before nodding at the girl. “We have company,” he said lightly. “So, Sarah. ‘Sensate’ huh?”

“You don’t believe me,” The girl said petulantly. “I said that you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Well,” Nate said. It didn’t matter if he believed her or not. She believed it. And she and the boy clearly thought _someone_ was after them. Even if they’d gotten the wrong end of the stick, whatever information they thought they had could still mean something for someone. “Why don’t you tell us a little more about it.”

“A sensate,” She stopped and swallowed before continuing in what was clearly a rehersed speech. “A sensate is a person born with a psychic connection to a group of other people around the globe. Um, we call it a cluster? There’s no indication of why someone is born sensate but the cluster is always born on the same day. Ours was born in May,” She smiled faintly, eyes flicking up to Nate’s before dancing away. “Here.”

She flipped the folder open, pulling out two x-rays. And placing them in the middle of the table. Nate let his eyes glance across them and looked away. He’d seen enough brain scans when Sam was – when Sam – he didn’t need to see any more.

“This is a sensate brain, and this is a normal brain,” she said. Tapping them both in turn. “Um, they’re different. My cluster-mate’s mum is a doctor. She helped us out with this and sent them to me. This one’s him and this one’s his brother, and I know you still don’t believe me.”

Nate grimaced. He imagined the same scepticism that was on Eliot’s face was on his own. Hardison was examining the x-rays and Parker was staring with a slightly scary intensity at Sarah. “Okay, say we do believe you. I don’t see how we can help you. ‘New breeds of human’ aren’t exactly our usual MO.”

“There’s this organisation,” Sarah said, taking another sheet out of the folder. It was clumsily typed, with the text and images jarringly unaligned like it had ben thrown together in Microsoft Word. “It’s called the BPO. It…experiments on people like us. Mostly it kills them.” Her voice turned utterly bleak on the last sentence, her eyes going dull as she blinked back tears. Regardless of how much of this thing was real, she really believed people had died over it. “They picked up one of my cluster a few years ago. They keep them alive until they find the rest of the cluster and then they…they kill all of them.”

“Okay,” Nate said, “But why us. Why not the police? You’re English, right? Why would you come all the way to America, just because your friend said her dad had heard of us.”

“It had to be you,” Sarah said, shaking her head. “You would believe us.”

“No, but,” Nate said, trying to keep his tone gentle, but there was no denying what he was saying. “I’m sorry, but, I don’t believe you. Psychics, magic, I don’t believe in it. I believe you’ve been through something traumatic, but I don’t believe that you got magic powers out of it.”

“I know,” The girl shook her head slowly. The strand of pink had escaped from her ponytail and she shoved it impatiently behind her ear. “I know you don’t believe me yet but – there was a trumpet.”

Nate felt himself go very, very still. Sophie was shooting him a concerned look, they all were. But they didn’t know about significance of it. The trumpet. No one knew about the tuba. No one but family.

Oblivious to his inner turmoil, the girl continued. “You got it from your dad. You never talked much about your dad. But you said he used to play Sinatra?. And one day he got one for you, and you used to play it in the evenings sometimes. Sam loved it. He was desperate to learn how to play. And that last year you gave it to him for his birthday. He was so excited to learn. And then, before he could, he went into hospital.”

“How do you know that?” Nate said hoarsely, “No-one knows that.”

“We aren’t – Sensates, we’re born part of a cluster, but we aren’t born _knowing_ we’re part of a cluster,” she said, her voice had turned gentle and Nate was distantly aware through the rushing in his ears that she was using the exact same tone that he had used on her. “We wake up. It hurts at first. Um, you get headaches, nausea, some people faint. Um, there’s also um phantom sensations, touch, taste, smell. The main thing is –”

“Hallucinations,” Nate breathed. The memory of the doctors face as he explained the symptoms of Sam’s undifferentiated frontal lobe syndrome. He looked down at the Xray’s for the first time. They were both children’s, One obviously a few years younger. The older one had a grey mass in it. The same tumour in exactly the same place as Sam’s had been.

“Sensates, I said, earlier, sensates are born on the same day, they’re” She swallowed, staring Nate straight in the eye, her face utterly and completely sincere. “actually, born at the same time. Exactly the same time. I – I mean there’s the time difference, but if you account for that – I was born on the 6th May, at 12:52pm, 1998.”

“The exact same time as Sam,” Nate said through numb lips.

“Yes,” Sarah said, squeezing her eyes closed. “he was part of the Cluster.”


End file.
